'Exactly a week ago,' Allen said, 'Carmel came over to my house to give me the news. And we had a drink, yadayadayada, and then she comes on to me.'

'Yeah?' Lucas' eyebrows went up.

'Yeah. Really hard. Really hard. And you know

Carmel. She gets what she wants.'

Lucas allowed a faint man-to-man smile to slip onto his face: 'The next thing you knew, you were working closely with your attorney.'

'What she did was fuck my brains loose. And she's been back three more times since then. Does that sound bad? Does that sound crazy? I can't sleep thinking about it, but I really can't talk to any of my friends, either. They'd go batshit if I told them. Most of them are Barbara's friends, too, out at the club.'

Lucas shook his head: 'I wouldn't worry about it too much. I've seen all kinds of reactions to spousal deaths, and believe me, you're not the first guy to fall in bed with another woman after his wife's been killed. Maybe there's a drive for intimacy.'

'You think so?' Allen said. He seemed to brighten, momentarily. Relief? Lucas wasn't sure.

'It's something like that,' Lucas said. 'Listen, as long as you've told me all this… why Carmel? She doesn't seem like your type. Detective Sherrill told me that you were a pretty relaxed guy. Carmel, on the other hand…"

'Detective Sherrill, she's the one…' He made a figure with his hands.

'Yeah.'

'She seemed nice.' His eyes wandered away again, and he hunched forward in his chair: 'Carmel… pillow talks. She told me that she's been in love with me for two years, and hid it, because she thought it was hopeless, because I was married to a rich woman.

She told me that Louise – that's the woman I was having an affair with – was a miserable gold-digger and a loser. She gets really violent about it.'

'Really?' Keep him rolling.

'I'm serious, once she grabbed me by the dick and said she'd cut it off if I ever put it back in Louise.'

'Whoa… And she said she was in love with you for two years?'

'Yeah, ever since a little thing in a restaurant. I couldn't even remember it.'

'Do you believe her? That she's been in love?'

'I know it sounds vain, but I do. You'd have to hear her talk. She remembered me saying things, doing things, places she'd bumped into me, times we'd just had a word or two.'

Lucas thought for a moment, and then said, 'Are you seeing her tonight?'

'Of course. Every night. She says we're gonna get married in a couple of years. ..'

'Huh.' Lucas turned in his chair to face his window, his fingers steepled at his mouth, and looked out at the street. He hoped he looked like Sherlock Holmes.

Then he swivelled back to face Allen. 'Do you think if you suggested that you go out to Penelope's, that she'd go?'

'Penelope's? Oh, heck yes, she loves that kind of scene, Minnetonka, the lake, all that. Trendy, expensive…'

'Call her. She lives downtown, right? She's got some kind of fabulous apartment that was in the Star Tribune?' Lucas knew exactly where she lived. He'd joked about it with a banker friend who lived in the same building.

'Right. And it is fabulous,' Allen said. 'Call her, suggest Penelope's, and when she gets to your place, suggest that she drive. Make up some kind of excuse.

Sprained your gas pedal ankle or something. Nothing serious, so you have to limp. Just get her to drive.'

'She drives most of the time anyway,' Allen said. 'She doesn't like my car. I gotta brown-and-creme Lexus, she calls it a Jap car. She's got this red Jag.'

'Good. Don't tell her any of this, by the way,' Lucas said. 'Don't tell her you talked to me. Just get her out there and have a nice long meal.' 'I will. What are you going to do?' 'Observe,' Lucas said. 'Not me, another guy.' 'Observe what?' Allen asked. 'This whole thing sounds a little bit off to me. Remember, whether you think like this or not: you are a rich guy. And you're good-looking.

Women are going to come after you, and it's hard to tell who's sincere and who isn't. So I got a guy on the staff who specializes in… mmm.. . what would you call it? Emotional readings, I guess. I'll have him take a look at the two of you, and tell me what he thinks. He'll look at her body language, stuff like that. I'll pass it along to you.'

'He's gonna eat with us?' Allen asked dimly. 'No, no. He'll just be there,'

Lucas said. 'Don't go looking around for him or anything – just enjoy yourself and make sure that you stay long enough that my guy can get a reading.'

'An emotional reading?'

Lucas spread his hands: 'Hey, it's what I got.'

When Allen had gone, Lucas leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a few moments, thinking about Carmel Loan. He ran through everything she'd said to him since the Allen killing, and in running through the various conversations they'd had, he stumbled over one small gemstone.

When he'd last talked to her, she'd made a deliberately crude comment about three dead spies and an upper class woman. Anyway, he remembered it that way; and he remembered that they'd had difficulty finding anyone to claim the bodies, or anyone who would even admit to knowing who they were.

Had they released the names by the time he'd seen Carmel? He didn't think so.

But who knows, maybe the television people had talked to the cops outside the house, and somebody made a comment. Or maybe a reporter had talked to a neighbor, and the names had gotten out. Maybe. That could explain how she knew the two Dinkytown dead were Latinos…

Carmel Loan. He scribbled her name on a legal pad, looked at it, then drew an arrow and scribbled another name: Rolando D'Aquila. Another arrow, at ninety degrees from the first, from Carmel to the next name, Hale Allen. He looked at that for a moment, drew another arrow from Carmel to Barbara

Allen; and another from Carmel to Dead Spies. Of course, her connection to Marta

Blanca and her dead boyfriend was purely part of his memory, nothing that could be proven…

A cold wind was already blowing through Lucas' chest. He knew what he was going to do – he even knew how he was going to do it, to the smallest detail – but the idea chilled him. He felt like a wealthy man about to shoplift something expensive. And fooling with Carmel Loan was not like messing with a doper or a player or a stick-up guy. If he screwed up, he could go to jail.

After a few minutes, he roused himself from the chair and walked down the hall to the Homicide office. Sloan was just leaving: 'The goddamned air conditioning is giving me goose bumps.' 'What are you doing tonight?' Lucas asked. 'Maybe taking the old lady out for a movie.' 'If you take her to Penelope's, on Lake

Minnetonka, I'll pay for the meal and sign off on the overtime.'

'Ya got me,' Sloan said quickly. 'For one thing, if I said no, the old lady'd murder me.' Sloan had a daughter in college and tuition to pay, and luxury was hard to come by. 'What do I have to do?'

When Sloan had gone, Lucas called Jim Bone, president of Polaris bank: 'Jim, are you gonna be home between eight and nine tonight?'

'Yeah; you need something?'

'I need to talk. Ten minutes, maybe. I've been running around like a mad dog, and I can't spring any time, during the day, and besides, you're busy…'

'Come on over. Kerin would love to see you.'

'How's she doing?' Bone's wife was pregnant.

'Just starting to show…'

'You guys didn't waste any time.'

'Yeah, well, we're old people.'

Myron Bunnson told everybody that his mother was a stone freak hippie and that his real given name was Bullet Blue, and that his father had been an Oakland

Hell's Angel, before the Angels got old. None of that was true. His parents were really named Myron (Senior) and Adele Bunnson, and they ran a dairy farm near

Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Bullet was working one of the three valet slots at Penelope's. He saw the red